


smoke from an unseen fire

by kieranwalker



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Amazingphil - Freeform, M/M, Mostly Fluff, but then ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), danisnotonfire - Freeform, they only kiss a little, they start out as just friends here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-11 00:42:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5607193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kieranwalker/pseuds/kieranwalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan squints his eyes and tilts his head. “Have you thought that through, logistically? I’m not sure the blue’ll show up. And what if you botch it, you’ll end up with a mess for the New York press thing.”</p>
<p>“Well, anything’ll be better than that time you chalked your hair right before Louise’s party.” Phil can barely finish his sentence before he’s giggling at Dan’s faux-insulted expression.</p>
<p>“Wow. Wow, Phil. Jesus Christ. What a low blow.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	smoke from an unseen fire

**Author's Note:**

> Insp: http://phanscherryblossom.tumblr.com/post/132449898797/you-know-if-theres-any-fic-about-dan-dyeing-phils

“Dan, please,” Phil whines to his flatmate, following him from his bedroom to the kitchen, carrying a box of hair dye.

“Phil, no. I’m not about to help you ruin your hair,” Dan replies, opening a cupboard, and taking out two mugs.

Phil pouts. “You sound like my mum. What’s the worst that could happen? It’ll fade.”

“Phil, do you not realize we have about a bazillion press interviews in America next week? They already have no idea what YouTube is, and if you show up with pink hair, I’m pretty sure they’ll cancel us.”

“Nah, they’ll just tell me how cool it looks! They’ll think to themselves, ‘Wow, I wish I had hair as cool as that guy. I bet he’s some kind of space prince.’”

Dan casts him a skeptical glance from where he’s fiddling with the hot water boiler. He carries a hot chocolate and a coffee into the lounge, waiting for Phil to follow. He does, swiping the box of cheap dye off the counter with him.

“It’s not even like a crazy color, Dan. I just want to dye it dark blue on top of my black.”

Dan squints his eyes and tilts his head. “Have you thought that through, logistically? I’m not sure the blue’ll show up. And what if you botch it, you’ll end up with a mess for the New York press thing.”

“Well, anything’ll be better than that time you chalked your hair right before Louise’s party.” Phil can barely finish his sentence before he’s giggling at Dan’s faux-insulted expression.

“Wow. Wow, Phil. Jesus Christ. What a low blow.”

Phil spreads his hands wide. “Sorry, but you know that was a regrettable choice!”

Dan looks at him for a moment, expression neutral, then says only “Rude” and looks back to his laptop, sipping his drink.

Another few seconds of puppy eyes on Phil’s part, and Dan sighs and shuts his laptop. “Why do you need my permission anyway? You’re a grown adult, you can do what you want.”

“I need your help with it, Dan. I don’t want to mess it up and end up melting half my face off with dye and turning into a blue humanoid monster!” He says this like it’s a real concern he has.

Dan lets out another sigh. He had planned on watching another episode of American Horror Story tonight, but what can he do, it’s Phil. The idiot probably would manage to mutate his DNA code just by attempting to dye his hair.

Gesturing for the box, he says in a skeptical voice, “Alright, how cheap is this. Is it going to absolutely destroy your hair?”

“Possibly,” Phil grins, jumping off the couch and jostling Dan, who looks disgruntled. As he bounds away to clear space on the bathroom counter for it, Dan tries to read the warnings on the back of the package—don’t put in eyes, don’t put in mouth—but gets distracted by the sound of Phil knocking things over. Rolling his eyes, he pushes himself up and follows him, abandoning their drinks.

“Hey, Phil, have you ever had a black henna tattoo, because it says that could increase your risk of an allergic reaction.”

“No, but there was this one time when—”

“Woah, I’m not sure I wanna hear that one. Save it for a video, why don’t you?”

Phil just smiles and swipes the last products into miscellaneous drawers. Dan tries to keep his urge to organize under control when he sees the mess of deodorant, combs, and—wait, is that his toothbrush?

“Phil,” he whines, holding it up, dust clinging to the bristles.

“Oops, sorry,” he says, smiling sheepishly. Dan throws it in the trash with a glare.

With the counter cleared, Phil begins tearing open the $5 box, pulling out all sorts of things Dan would describe as “unrelated to hair dying” and “erotic” (seriously, there’s gloves and some sketchy looking plastic thing he’s not sure he would touch if Phil asked him to).

Dan looks at him in the mirror. “Before we begin, I just want you to know, I hold zero responsibility for how this looks on you.”

“Come on, Dan, it’ll be fine! As long as you don’t screw it up,” Phil says, bumping his hip against Dan’s.

Ten minutes of squinting at small text in a font Dan tells Phil is “visually assaulting” and “comparable to the atrocity of Papyrus,” and they’ve actually cracked out the dye. Dan’s got the kinky gloves on, smeared with blue and Phil’s sitting on the toilet seat with his eyes closed. For a moment, Dan just looks at him, sitting there like a absolute child, hands folded in his lap, and wonders how he ever got to this moment, where another human being trusts him this much.

He’s still thinking about the pressure to not mess this up when Phil opens one eye, looking at Dan in the mirror. “I thought you left,” he says in a soft tone, “go on!”

I’d never leave. Dan thinks wildly before he asks, “Are you really sure about this?”

“Yes.”

“As sure as you were about Eliza Pancakes being Dil’s soul mate?”

“Dan.”

Alright. Dan moves closer to Phil and smoothes his fringe back with his free hand. Phil’s relaxes, leaning into Dan’s hand, and Dan pauses for a moment before he writes it off as Phil just being comfortable around him. After a last “okay” as a warning, he smears the blue from his left hand onto the middle of Phil’s head. Both wrinkle up their faces as the paste globs onto his damp hair, and the smell of harsh chemicals is already pervading the bathroom.

From there, things go fairly well—it’s not too hard to smear dye over someone’s head—until Dan gets to the fringe, which has fallen back onto Phil’s forehead. Dan thought Phil was pretty much asleep until he goes to spread the dye on and nearly gets a heart attack when Phil flinches away at his touch.

“Your hands are cold,” he says in a baby voice.

Dan rolls his eyes. “Phil Lester, you are a grown man, you can take it.”

“It’s also wet, and you're getting it all over my forehead.”

He looks ridiculous, hair souped up with dye and a towel clipped around his shoulders like a cape; Dan throws him a casual wink, then goes back to applying.

After twenty minutes of Dan being a perfectionist and coating each individual hair, they’ve both inhaled enough of the fumes to make them giggly and a little too talkative. Dan sets a timer and attempts to clean the counter with no help from Phil, who’s preoccupied with craning his neck to see his hair in the mirror whilst still remaining seated on the toilet. And he says Dan is the lazy one.

Dan fiddles with hair straighter wires, trying to untangle the mess in the cupboard under the sink. Phil’s started biting the temple of his glasses which Dan is trying not to find attractive. “You know, my mum said I was once approached to be a hand model.”  
“Shut the fuck up, no you weren’t.”

“No, really Dan! I could have been famous.”

“You already are famous, you flop.”

But Phil is preoccupied with his hands. He splays them over his face in a parody of Vogue models and causes Dan a laugh. Phil hooks a couple of fingers into the corner of his mouth, continuing the imitation. Avoiding eye contact, Dan lets out with a false laugh. As he ducks his head back under the sink, he wonders at how naive Phil is or if he’s intentionally being suggestive to mess with Dan.

Phil goes back to chattering about how he’s going to look like a space boy while Dan laughs at him and smacks his hands away from touching his hair.

“Phil, you know you’re the most careless person ever, if you touch that stuff in your hair, we’ll find it on twelve of our shirts next week.”

He slumps down. “True, I am pretty bad when it come to neatness.”

“You think?” Dan says indignantly, whipping open the drawer of chaos from before. But Phil just smiles his angel smile, and Dan can’t be too mad.

When the timer quacks—why did he set it on Phil’s phone, why—Dan starts the shower as Phil strips his jeans off. Dan helps him with his sweatshirt, lifting it carefully over his head and managing to only get a little blue on it. He makes a mental note to wash it separately because Phil won’t think of it.

Even though steam rolls up from the shower head, Phil holds his elbows, slightly chilled in only his boxers. Dan wants to put his arms around his thin waist and hold him against his chest—to get him warm, Dan quickly tells himself. Frowning, he takes Phil by the shoulders and pushes him gently towards the shower.

“And I hope most of it comes off,” he grumbles under his breath, but at this point, he doesn’t really mean it. He turns to leave Phil to wash his hair alone, but his heart stutters when Phil catches his fingers. His voice is low in his throat when he says, “Will you help me?”

Dan nods—they are best friends of six years, he should be able to help him wash his freaking hair, after all—and begins to shrug off his own sweatshirt. One arm in, then the other, but cold fingers knock his out of the way when he reaches down to pull it over his head. They brush his stomach as they tug up the fabric, sending icy shocks through Dan. He tries to look and see Phil’s expression, but only gets a bunch of fabric in his face. It messes up his fringe and Dan grimaces. Before he even has the chance to open his eyes, the same cold hands are running through his hair, smoothing it back into place, stroking over his forehead, and—Dan thinks he must have imagined it—running down the sides of his face, over his cheekbones. His eyes open, unsure. Phil’s back is to him, fingers brushing down his forearms to tangle with his hands. Loosely clinging to Dan, Phil steps towards the shower. Dan lets himself be pulled, white tile cold under his feet and mind on high alert.

Phil’s already in while Dan stops to pull his jeans off; Phil’s eyes laugh at him as he struggles. Dark blue begins to draw lines on the side of Phil’s face and taper off under his ears. One hand scrubs his scalp listlessly, but most of his attention is focused on Dan. Tight jeans discarded—with much effort—Dan steps into the shower and immediately regrets it. The slope of the bathtub slides his feet right up against Phil’s, bumping their boxer-ed hips together. In all his times of using it, this shower has never felt smaller. He’s way too close to Phil for just platonic mates.

“Uh, sorry,” he starts, shuffling backwards to put some space between them, cursing the tiny size of London apartments. Jesus, what Phil must be thinking. He’s probably really uncomfortable with Dan that close, god, why is he such an awkward person. Friends don’t just get into the shower with friends and step really close to them. He needs to get the eff out of this situation before he makes it worse.

“Uh, Phil, I’m just gonna,” he gestures out of the shower, and starts stepping out. “Sorry.”

He has a heart attack when Phil speaks. “Dan, it’s okay.”

He turns around, confused. Hadn’t he just made things supremely uncomfortable? He had definitely overstepped the just-bros line, physically. Didn’t matter it was on accident. Too much of their lives are coded into a romantic relationship for them to be able to brush off these moments like normal people probably do.

Phil steps out of the shower’s spray, taking Dan’s hesitant hands. Dan looks down at their joined hands and says, “Sorry, Phil. I just, uh...slipped. But you can wash your hair on your own, right, I’ll just…”

He breaks off at Phil’s little insistent tugs on his fingertips. His puppy eyes seem to say, “Please?” and it's so endearing Dan’s knees go weak. Gradually, he coaxes Dan back into the shower, back into the danger zone of being Too Close To Phil. He guides Dan’s hands to his hair and looks up at him from under his wet eyelashes, waiting. Dan’s senses are on red alert, but Phil flashes him a small, reassuring smile. Dan’s beginning to suspect just how much Phil really needs help washing out the dye.

Determined to be all business, Dan moves Phil’s head so it’s under the water flow and begins massaging out the blue. Fine hair slips through his fingers as he circles Phil’s temples, and he’s idly reminded of how jealous he is of his hair.

Dan’s palms are resting on the sides of Phil’s head, fingers reaching up to work over his scalp. He can feel Phil’s eyes on him, but he doesn’t dare look down when they’re this close. Maybe Phil’s comfortable as just friends and being this close, but Dan sure isn’t. He’s determined not to make it more awkward though, and just continues working through his hair, trying to ignore the cold water trickling down his front.

Dan nearly jumps out of his skin when Phil touches two frozen fingertips to Dan’s hip. He forgets his self control and meets Phil’s gaze. He means for himself to look confused and distant, as any normal guy would, but he’s so sick of lying to himself. When they lock eyes, his hands go slack in Phil’s hair, tangling in his wet locks. He slumps forward to lean into Phil’s neck, mouth breathing on the skin just below his ear, relief at giving up the facade coursing through his veins. A long moment passes while the tepid water continues to spill around them, running off Phil’s cheekbones and down Dan’s back. Dan distractedly resumes combing his hair, still getting little trails of blue to run down Phil’s cheeks. By the time the water runs clear on the floor, Phil still hasn’t stopped staring at Dan. Dan’s eyes flick over his and down to his mouth, questioning, while Phil catches Dan’s hands, which were extricating themselves from his hair. He pushes his head back under them, like a cat would rub its head under an owner’s hand, plunging Dan’s fingers deep into his scalp, rubbing against his palms. Dan grasps around and Phil shuts his eyes in pleasure, head tilting back against the walls wet with condensation. Dan has no idea what to make of this situation. Phil’s mouth is open and it’s all he can do to keep himself from leaning in with his own, hot and running all over his wet and clammy skin.

He’s telling himself to be reasonable and step back when Phil’s eyes open again, coming out of his orgasm-like state, as if he can sense Dan’s reservation. The burning eye contact starts up again, clouding Dan’s rational thoughts. Dan leans millimeters closer, holding Phil by his hair. He jumps when cold fingers touch his abdomen through his wet t-shirt that’s now plastered to his body. They brush down his stomach and lift up the hem, skimming over his skin. Dan’s breath is mingling with Phil’s now, and he lets his hand slid down to the nape of Phil’s neck to tug at the hiar there.

Is this really happening?

Phil’s fingers lazily work around to the small of Dan’s back and rest just above his waistband, lightly touching. They’re so close their feet alternate on the floor, Phil, Dan, Phil, Dan. A gentle pressure from Phil pulls Dan even closer, so their eyelashes brush and noses drip water onto each other’s cheeks. Phil tips his chin forward and slowly relaxes his lips onto Dan’s. Dan feels fire lace into his mouth where Phil kisses him, ripping into his very veins and making his skin burn under the cold water.

The water pours down around them, finding its way between their lips, their skin, their bones. It’s everywhere Phil’s hands are on Dan and drips off the ends of their boxer shorts. Dan kisses the droplets from Phil’s eyelids as Phil clutches at Dan’s wet hair. They hold each other tight against the wet tile wall, hips leaning together, so much adrenaline coursing through them you would think it was 2009 on that train platform.

They kiss until the dye has probably washed out entirely and their fingers are pruned. Until they come to their senses and realize this changes everything. Until they’re just two dorks, standing there in their underwear, with six years of implicit love.


End file.
